Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (66 page)

Coonan had never been much of a womanizer and wasn’t really one for elaborate courtships. A Hell’s Kitchen survivalist who spent his early years (what might otherwise have been years of sexual maturation) behind bars, he was straight-laced and even somewhat prudish. He liked and admired Edna, who was four years his senior, but he first wanted to make sure the coast was clear. One afternoon at Sonny’s Café on Ninth Avenue, Coonan asked Billy Beattie, the former flame, about his intentions vis-à-vis Edna Fitzgerald.

Beattie said, “I ain’t seen her in about a month. Far as I’m concerned, it’s over and done with.”

“Good,” replied Jimmy. “That’s what I was hopin’ to hear. I been hangin’ out with her myself.”

“Hey, knock yourself out. She’s all yours.”

Jimmy and Edna became an item, and within four months of Jimmy’s conversation with Beattie, he and Edna made plans to get married.

What Coonan liked about Edna was that she was tough, a classic defender of the throne. She was a good mother. She knew when to keep her mouth shut or when to circle the wagons. Her years as an orphan and as a struggling young widow with two kids had imbued her with a fierce sense of entitlement.

“We’re gonna get what we got coming to us,” she often told Sissy as they drove around Hell’s Kitchen collecting money for Jimmy.

“That woman is a bitch on wheels,” Sissy told Mickey on the phone while he was in prison. “She has the heart of a gangster. And she’s cheap. She’s cheating us outta money.”

Sometimes Mickey would laugh, but he also knew his wife was right.

“Stay the fuck away from her,” he told Sissy. “I’ll take care of things when I get back.”

In the Realm of the Westies

After serving just over four years of his six-year sentence, Featherstone was paroled and released from prison in July 1983. He spent a few weeks at a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey before being reunited with his wife and family. Still basking in the glow of his new positive attitude, which he had acquired through group therapy sessions in prison, Mickey and Sissy talked about the future. It annoyed Mickey that Coonan and the gang had not taken care of his wife while he was away, but he was determined not to let it drag him down. He and Sissy both agreed that Mickey should try to steer clear of the Westies. They should try to make it on their own.

Mickey’s first big test came in September, two months after his return to civilian life, when he came into Manhattan one afternoon to pick Sissy up from work at the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum. He bumped into Vinnie Leone, a union official from ILA Local 1909. Vinnie Leone was half a wiseguy who’d been instituted into Local 1909 as part of the Westies arrangement with Paul Castellano and the Gambino family.

“Hey, Mickey. I heard you was back,” said Leone. The burly, silver-haired union boss gave Featherstone a hug. “You gotta come by the office; say hello to the fellas.”

There were three or four men playing cards at a table in the front room when Leone and Featherstone entered the red-brick ILA offices on Twelfth Avenue. Leone introduced Mickey to everybody and then said, “Hey, I was out of state visiting Jimmy last week.”

“Yeah?” said Mickey. “How’s he doing?”

“Tough as can be. You know Jimmy.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Mick, everybody’s happy to have you back here. No shit. Things’ve been goin’ good, real good.”

To illustrate his point, Leone pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a few twenties. “Here,” he said, handing some money to Featherstone. “Here’s a hundred. But that’s chickenshit. Just some chump change to get you started. They’ll be more from now on. Way more.”

“Nah,” said Mickey. “That’s all right.”

Leone laughed; he thought Mickey was joking. He tried to stick the bills in Mickey’s shirt pocket. When Mickey insisted that he didn’t want the money and would rather “go my own way,” Leone turned serious. “All right, Mick, if you say so. But I gotta tell ya, Jimmy C. ain’t gonna like this one bit.”

Mickey shrugged and left the office.

For a while, Featherstone did his best to maintain the pact he’d made with himself and his wife. Through his brother-in-law, he got a job as a bartender at a catering hall in Garfield, New Jersey, where he made a modest living wage. Mickey and Sissy’s most immediate problem was their apartment. It was far too small to accommodate a family of four. They went house-hunting and found a place they liked in Teaneck, a pleasant middle-class town just a thirty-minute drive from the West Side of Manhattan.

“I love the house,” said Sissy. “But we can’t afford it right now.”

Mickey thought about it and said, “Let me try Jimmy. Just this one time. He owes me.”

Sissy was against the idea. As bad as she wanted the house, she knew that if they borrowed the money from Coonan, it would come with strings attached—strings that would inevitably entangle Mickey and draw him back into the realm of the Westies.

From the inception of the mob, going straight, or staying clean, was one of the most threatening things a gangster could try to do. Becoming involved in the criminal life was usually something that happened incrementally and without much thought, but getting out often required that a person go cold turkey and sever ties in a manner that was bound to create misunderstandings and deep suspicion on the part of those left behind. Few things are more dangerous to the mob than an ex-mobster, who knows where the bodies are buried and has no compelling financial stake in keeping his mouth shut.

Featherstone, whose very identity had been established as a prominent enforcer for the Westies, had the additional problem of trying to walk away from the gang while still psychologically and financially wedded to the neighborhood. Perhaps he was living in a dreamworld, thinking he could simply move to the suburbs and leave the Westies behind. Or maybe he was thinking he could still keep one toe in the water, as Jimmy Coonan had done, living in suburban New Jersey while controlling the neighborhood as a commuter criminal. In any event, Mickey wasn’t making it any easier for himself by going to his longtime buddy with his hand outstretched, especially when he had to ask for the loan through Jimmy’s battleaxe of a wife.

“Gee, Mickey, I don’t know,” said Edna, after Featherstone asked for a loan of $40,000, which he pledged to pay back in installments. “I gotta talk to Jimmy about that, see what he says.”

Two weeks later Mickey got his answer, and it didn’t even come from Edna. It came from a neighborhood contact of Mickey’s, who heard it from Edna’s brother, who heard it from Edna, who got the word from Jimmy. The answer was “No.”

At first Mickey was shocked. “After all the shit I been through with Jimmy Coonan?” he asked himself. “Murders, hacking up bodies, being willing to die for the guy? And this ungrateful motherfucker tells me no?”

Sissy said she wasn’t surprised at all; she had expected it. But Mickey found it hard to believe that Coonan, for whom he had literally put himself through hell, would treat him this way.

Four weeks later, Mickey and Sissy received an invitation to an engagement party for the Coonans’ oldest son, Bobby. The party was to be held in a large room at the Hazlet, New Jersey, firehouse, and everyone from the old neighborhood was expected to attend. Edna had even rented a bus to pick up a group of people in front of the Skyline Motor Inn on Tenth Avenue and transport them to and from Hazlet.

“I can’t believe this bitch,” said Sissy when they got the invitation. “She treats us like dogs, then expects us to come to an engagement party?”

Mickey, however, wanted to go. “We can’t let her think she controls our lives. Why give her the satisfaction? We’ll go there and hold our heads high just like everybody else.”

It was a snowy night in November when over one hundred residents from Hell’s Kitchen arrived at the firehouse in Hazlet. Edna had hired a band, so there was dancing, and tables were set up around the room where people could eat and talk. It was a festive atmosphere, with everyone drinking and getting reacquainted.

At some point in the evening, Edna sidled up to Mickey and said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” said Mickey.

“Jimmy feels bad about the loan. He knows you need money and all, so he’s got a proposition. He’s willin’ to turn over the West Side piers to you, the whole thing. But you gotta do something for him.”

“I’m listening.”

Edna explained that there were three people Jimmy wanted whacked. One was Vinnie Leone, the ILA official the Italians had ensconced on the West Side. According to Coonan, Leone was ripping off the Westies, and Jimmy had received authorization from the Gambino family to take him out.

The other guy Jimmy wanted whacked was Billy Beattie, Edna’s ex-boyfriend. Beattie had welched on a loan shark debt that was long overdue. “Jimmy wants him dead,” said Edna, “and so do I.”

The third person was another neighborhood guy who had run afoul of Jimmy.

Mickey listened to all of this and said, “Edna, I don’t want it. Don’t want no part of this shit.”

“Mickey, this is serious. This is business.”

“I know what it is. I don’t want it.”

Edna looked hard at Featherstone. “Okay, Mickey, I’ll tell Jimmy. I know he’s gonna be very disappointed.”

Mickey shrugged.

“’Cause you know this is gonna get done anyway, right? Whether you do it or somebody else does it, it’s gonna get done.”

“That ain’t my problem. That’s your problem.”

After Mickey and Edna separated, Sissy Featherstone approached her husband. She’d overheard bits and pieces of his conversation with Coonan’s wife, and she could hardly contain her anger. “Are you gettin’ involved with these fucking people? Are you gettin’ involved again?”

Mickey and Sissy argued loudly, attracting the attention of those around them. Mickey tried to explain that he had said no to Edna’s proposition, but Sissy was so upset she was hardly listening. “That treacherous bitch!” she kept saying over and over.

Things got even more heated later on that night, when a smaller group of neighborhood people reconvened over at the Coonan house. After watching Edna gleefully show off each and every new gadget in her house and catching her once again trying to lure Mickey back into Jimmy’s schemes, Sissy could no longer contain herself. She laid into Edna, calling her a “fat cunt,” a “treacherous bitch,” and every other insult she could think of. Edna just sat there like she was above it all.

“You just remember,” snapped Sissy, grabbing Mickey to leave. “You keep that husband of yours outta our lives, or I’ll come back here and burn this goddamn house to the ground.”

After that, Mickey tried to stay on the straight and narrow. He got a job at Erie Transfer, a Teamster garage based in Hell’s Kitchen that supplied rented trucks and trailers to the entertainment industry. He didn’t have a union book yet, but he was getting work almost every day just by showing up. There was plenty of idle time on the job—and lots of cocaine. Coke was prevalent at every level of the entertainment business at the time, and it was commonly sold in working-class bars throughout Hell’s Kitchen. Mickey had tried to avoid it at first, preferring marijuana and alcohol. But the boredom and routine nature of daily employment, plus his estrangement from his fellow Westies, ate away at Featherstone’s resolve until he was snorting coke on the job almost every day.

Working on the West Side, he was never far away from his old haunts and old ways. As much as he may have wanted to, Featherstone could not entirely separate himself from the gang. He’d heard through the grapevine that certain people in the neighborhood were using his name, as in “You better pay up, or Mickey Featherstone is gonna be pissed.” Or, “We’re with Mickey Featherstone, so you better not try an’ cross us.” The idea that certain members of the Westies were making money off his reputation without his authorization was enough to push him over the edge.

Edna had been right about one thing: Underworld crime on the West Side was going to continue, and Jimmy Coonan’s wishes would be carried out, whether Mickey was in on it or not. Featherstone found this to be true a couple months after Edna’s party in New Jersey, when he heard that one of the people on Coonan’s hit list had been whacked. Jimmy McElroy told Mickey how he and a fellow gang member, Kevin Kelly, killed Vinnie Leone, the ILA official who was ripping them off.

The conversation took place at McElroy’s West Side apartment, which had a panoramic view overlooking the Hudson River. Kevin Kelly was also there. Nine years younger than Featherstone and McElroy, Kelly represented the next generation of gangsters on the West Side. He’d grown up hearing stories about Coonan and Featherstone and the neighborhood’s glorious gangland associations. Short and black-haired (with a passing resemblance to the actor Matt Dillon), Kelly was a godson of James McManus, the neighborhood political leader, and married to Jimmy McElroy’s niece. His entire life seemed to be devoted to positioning himself to take over the Hell’s Kitchen rackets.

The three men—Featherstone, McElroy, and Kelly—were sitting in McElroy’s front room, deep into an afternoon session of whiskey and cocaine, when McElroy and Kelly explained how, a week earlier, they met Leone at the Local 1909 offices on Twelfth Avenue. Leone lived out in Jersey near one of McElroy’s girlfriends, and they asked him if he’d be willing to drop them off on his way home. “Sure,” Leone said.

In the car, McElroy told Vinnie they had some good coke they wanted to try out. Vinnie was game. He exited the expressway and pulled over on an idyllic tree-lined suburban street. Kelly was in the back seat, McElroy in the front passenger seat, and Leone behind the wheel.

After Leone had just taken in a snout full of white powder, Kelly, from behind, put a small caliber automatic to the base of Vinnie’s skull and began firing. He emptied the chamber, firing six shots when one would have easily done the job. Leone’s head and brains splattered like watermelon over the inside of the windshield. Particles of flesh and brain matter sprayed Jimmy McElroy, who had his fingers pressed to his ears, trying to block out the deafening sound of gunfire. Kelly, an amateur, hadn’t even used a silencer.